Reviews for Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader by LSD Software
Review by Ashley
Rated 4 out of 5
by Ashley, 2 years agoIt works, but it's not what I expected. I'm using Firefox for Android on a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+.
In order to have text read aloud, you need to either highlight text yourself or just be on the page you want read (in its entirety, with all headings & image description text, etc) and then you trigger the add-on in the browser's vertical elipsis menu (or is it a skinny hamburger?). Then, you will be in a totally new tab with only the text from the page and a pause/play and settings button.
I was hoping the "popup" option under this addon's settings would allow me to just highlight some paragraphs I want read, for instance, long-press it and be able to choose "read aloud" or something like that. Maybe I'd even see a tiny popup once triggered with the pause/play controls or it would be in the toolbar.
I ran into the issue that I couldn't get the voice to stop talking after pressing stop, changing tabs, and even closing Firefox (had to kill Firefox manually in my phone's "app info"). It would be great to be able to hear the reading after leaving a tab, but the ability to pause & start again are obviously important as well.
In order to have text read aloud, you need to either highlight text yourself or just be on the page you want read (in its entirety, with all headings & image description text, etc) and then you trigger the add-on in the browser's vertical elipsis menu (or is it a skinny hamburger?). Then, you will be in a totally new tab with only the text from the page and a pause/play and settings button.
I was hoping the "popup" option under this addon's settings would allow me to just highlight some paragraphs I want read, for instance, long-press it and be able to choose "read aloud" or something like that. Maybe I'd even see a tiny popup once triggered with the pause/play controls or it would be in the toolbar.
I ran into the issue that I couldn't get the voice to stop talking after pressing stop, changing tabs, and even closing Firefox (had to kill Firefox manually in my phone's "app info"). It would be great to be able to hear the reading after leaving a tab, but the ability to pause & start again are obviously important as well.
1,068 reviews
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 13723830, 4 hours agovoice is super robotic, there is no control over speed. unusable for me
- Rated 1 out of 5by Th4t, 16 hours ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Fabs, 2 days agoI'm quite baffled by all the bad reviews; the default voice is indeed uncomprehensible, but changing it to one of the (many!) Piper voices actually gives you an output that's easy to listen to and quite enjoyable. English voices' output is, in my opinion, almost on par to Edge's TTS.
While I can't speak for all the other languages, I can say that at the moment the Italian Piper models are a bit lacking compared to the English ones, but they're still comprehensible. - Rated 5 out of 5by P R Merrill, 7 days agoMy eyesight is failing *AMD) and this extension has saved my life. It's only fault is it won't read text that isn't really text but a picture of text. quite a few folks use that method on wed sites and ads. I will just skip those. Thanks for being there for us.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Martina, 11 days agoUsed to work great, I do not mind robotic voices as long as my eyes get a rest. But last few days it is barely usable, it is not reading paragraph I click on, but it reads everything from the start, or does reads whole paragraphs on every section I click. It used to skip immediately where I wanted. It does not stop when I click stop, nor pause. It highlights different sections than it reads. Removing and adding the add on again did not hep. On average, I rate 3 stars due to previous good experience, but it is no longer usable for me.
- Rated 4 out of 5by Nahuel, 11 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Tyler, 12 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Peter, 12 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Kambiz, 16 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by DiegoC, 17 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by anthony.fordjr, 20 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by MozBruttoDev, 21 days ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by k0ns0l, 23 days agoIt appears I can no longer install a custom voice :/
Activity log is showing "TypeError: Error in input stream" even after a 100% install status. - Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18740215, 25 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18739799, 25 days ago
Developer response
posted a month agoPlease right click the Read Aloud icon and choose Options, then you can choose from a variety of voices, including the new Piper voices powered by machine learning.- Rated 5 out of 5by Dedy Hidayat, a month ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by techguru12, a month agoJust robotic terrible voice which is there whatever I choose, reinstalling ... nothing works!! awfull
- Rated 1 out of 5by Hashimx10, a month agoeven talkit from windows 98 is still much better than this one.
- Rated 3 out of 5by MC, a month ago